Poets

Sasha Pimentel

Sasha Pimentel was born in Manila and raised in the United States and Saudi Arabia. She received an MFA from California State University, Fresno. Pimentel is the author of For Want of Water (Beacon Press, 2017), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Gregory Pardlo, and Insides She Swallowed (West End Press, 2010), which received the 2011 American Book Award. She is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently teaches in the Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. She lives in El Paso, Texas.

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Lesson Plans

By This Poet

Lost softness softly makes a trap for us.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
Michael’s skin splinters below the water’s line, his navel and all murky and lostlike a city from my old life, or that scarf I’d loved, the softnesswith which we sink into what disappears, and the country of his groin and knees so softlyalready blackened. His sister snores below my hands. Her mouth makestadpoles. Her breath wet from chemotherapy, I’ve massaged her a- sleep. Her shoulders swell their small tides. The air burns leaves. I want to want to trapher sighs, dividing the stillness, in glass, to a Mason jar: breath like smoke against a window—: forthis man halved by water. But we sit in sun and grit, watch the waves which lose us.

You map my cheeks in gelatinous dark, your torso
floating, a forgotten moon, and a violin
crosses the sheets while you kiss me your mouth
of castanets. I believed once my uncles lived
in trees, from the encyclopedia I’d carried
to my father, The Philippines, the Ilongot hunting
from a branch, my father’s chin in shadows. I try
to tell you about distance, though my body
unstitches, fruit of your shoulder lit by the patio
lamp, grass of you sticky with dew, and all
our unlit places folding, one
into another. By dead night: my face in the pillow,
your knuckles in my hair, my father whipping my
back. How to lift pain from desire, the word
safety from safe, me, and the wind
chatters down gutters, rumoring
rain. I graze your stubble, lose my edges mouthing your
name. To love what we can no longer
distinguish, we paddle the other’s darkness, whisper
the bed, cry the dying violet hour; you twist
your hands of hard birches, and we peel into
our shadows, the losing of our names.

Ilocos, PhillippinesWhat did she permit him to see, my mother, the first time
he brought her to the ocean—the goat, hungry—mewling
in the distance while my mother shrugged her shirtsleeve
down, her shoulder fragile in new day? Or was it her wrist
which implied the unfreckling of her forearm? The susurrus
of flycatchers . . . softened bleats of starving. A hawk is circling
closer. What do we see when we see? I can see my mother,
but never my father. His shadow darkens her arm. Her breast
sinks to a curve we three know—, and there’s enough time
for hair to come loose, the popping of a button. A rat reveals
himself in the corner the way a woman tenses in and out
of light—: and my mother is coming to that point of breath-
lessness, humidity speckling her birdwing clavicles—
and the goat’s hooves rustle—: above mud, before harm.